Delicatessen ($29.99 DVD) The post-Weinstein move to squeeze every last drop from the Miramax library has its upside, as this long-delayed DVD attests. I can still remember walking into the Ritz at the Bourse in 1992, having chosen Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro's first feature based on its funny-looking poster, and having the movie's gothic slapstick hit me like a ton of rubber bricks. Nothing Jeunet, who split with Caro after 1995's City of Lost Children, has done since has quite equaled the seamless nuttiness of Delicatessen, set in a meat-starved dystopia where unlucky tenants end up in the first-floor butcher shop. Shot in acid, fish-eye yellows, the film's hyperstylization reaches a delirious zenith in the sequence where an entire tenement's actions take on the rhythm of a copulating couple's rusty bedsprings. Jeunet fans will recognize much of his gallery of human grotesques in the cast (Jean-Claude Dreyfus, Ticky Holgado and the brilliant Dominique Pinon among them). The DVD ports a making-of doc and Jeunet's commentary from the French disc, with English subtitles attached.

Duma ($19.98 DVD) Carroll Ballard's splendid-looking, mildly old-fashioned boy-and-his-cheetah tale became a minor cause celebre last year when the film's distributor, Warner Bros., backed away from a full-scale theatrical release, citing disappointing test runs in Chicago and the Southwest. A handful of critics took up the cause; here was lyrical, resonant children's fare, without fast-food tie-ins or CGI flash, a film that might cause children to pester parents for nature hikes instead of action figures. But by the time Duma pulled into New York in September, more than five months after its initial debut, the fate of Ballard's heartwarmer (his first since 1996's Fly Away Home) was pretty well sealed.

Released at last to the rest of the country, Duma is revealed as something less than a murdered masterpiece. The film's narrative, loosely based on a book by Carol Cawthra Hopcraft and her son, Xan, is patchy and predictable, never quite taking on the mythic resonance Ballard so obviously seeks. (It doesn't help that the rough sound mix—often a sign that a studio has lost faith and is trying to cut costs—muffles large chunks of dialogue.) But the interaction between young Alex Michaeletos and his not-quite-pet cat is frequently astonishing, as is the South African countryside around them. As they traverse the desert, fulfilling the boy's dying father's wish to see the cat returned to its natural habitat, the two seem to have a rapport born of years and not months. Domesticated in story terms (and, obviously, trained in real life), the film's cheetah (actually, four of them) never has the whipped look of a scrawny zoo cat; he's just feral enough to suggest the consequences of keeping him out of the wild much longer.

The film fares less well when it has the boy meet a wandering tribesman (Oz's Eamonn Walker) whose main function is to augment his young charge's life lessons; the failure to explore the implications of such a friendship, connecting a black man to a white boy born after the end of apartheid, feels less utopian than neglectful. But considering that few children's movies even bump up against such themes, the movie's failure to exhaust them is pardonable, if regrettable.

Misc. Picks The Franklin Institute hosts a mini-retro of Max Fleischer's Superman cartoons, presented by the Philadelphia Film Society (Fri., 8 p.m.). The County, Bryn Mawr and Ambler theaters sleep The Big Sleep (Mon., Wed. and Thu., respectively, all at 7 p.m.). Charlton Heston's chest hair takes over Liberty Lands, as the Lawn Chair Drive-In says, "Happy birthday, America! Here's Planet of the Apes!" (Tue., dusk).